Monday, November 16, 2009

Bootylicious and Good Hair

Intersectionality deals with the different levels and aspects of discrimination dependently constructing a category. Both articles describe the racist + sexist point of view mass media generally takes on, including the implications that whites are the standard, the norm, upon which all other people are compared to/deviate from.

I really can't think of specific examples other than Destiny's Child's word [that they popularized] that is part of the modern lexicon: bootylicious. Maybe it's because the girl group who sang this song was a group of black females, but this word connotes a black woman's big butt and her delicious body, words that aren't really associated with white women, unless it's being compared to.

And not to be jumping around, but hook's article mentioned the black woman's hair, and I thought of Chris Rock's recent documentary Good Hair. I wanted to see it when it was released in the IFC theater but I'm so behind on films.. It looks like a really interesting movie that was inspired by Chris Rock's own daughter who questioned her hair, because it wasn't like the other girls', and so this explains the story and desire for "good hair"...

An afterthought: here's a photo I wanted to add that isn't about the black female, but this is Lebron James on the cover of Vogue (which has been compared to the King Kong poster), and I'd like to mention that black women aren't the only "wild" ones depicted in media..